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Rows of carved rongorongo glyphs cover a worn wooden tablet.
WonderUndeciphered writing fact

Rongorongo is a script of glyphs carved into wood on Rapa Nui (Easter Island). More than twenty inscribed objects survive, but no proposed decipherment has won scholarly acceptance, and the texts remain unread.

Rongorongo

LanguageArchaeology

The story behind the card

The glyphs show human, animal, plant and geometric shapes. They are written in reverse boustrophedon: the reader follows one line from left to right, then turns the tablet upside down to read the next. Outsiders first reported the tablets in 1864, soon after Peruvian slave raids and a smallpox epidemic had killed much of the island's population, apparently including those who could read them. No bilingual text has been found to serve as a key. The surviving pieces are kept in museums and collections off the island, from the Santiago Staff in Chile's capital to tablets in Rome and Washington, and claims of a solution have so far failed to convince specialists.

Türkçe oku
Rongorongo, Rapa Nui'de (Paskalya Adası) ahşaba kazınmış işaretlerden oluşan bir yazıdır. Günümüze yirmiyi aşkın yazılı nesne ulaştı; ama önerilen çözümlerin hiçbiri bilim dünyasında kabul görmedi ve metinler hâlâ okunamıyor.

İşaretler insan, hayvan, bitki ve geometrik biçimleri andırır. Yazı “ters bustrofedon” düzenindedir: bir satır soldan sağa okunur, sonraki satırı okumak için tablet baş aşağı çevrilir. Dışarıdan gelenler tabletlerden ilk kez 1864'te söz etti. Bu, Perulu köle avcılarının baskınları ve bir çiçek salgını adanın nüfusunun büyük bölümünü yok ettikten kısa süre sonraydı; görünüşe göre yazıyı okuyabilenler de ölenler arasındaydı. Anahtar işlevi görecek iki dilli bir metin bulunamadı. Günümüze kalan parçalar, Şili'nin başkentindeki Santiago Asası'ndan Roma ve Washington'daki tabletlere kadar adanın dışındaki müze ve koleksiyonlarda saklanıyor. Çözüldüğü yönündeki iddialar şimdiye dek uzmanları ikna edemedi.

Sources and further reading

Image details

Detail of a rongorongo tablet at Bishop Museum, photographed in 2010.

“Rongorongo tablet” — christopherhu, 2010, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

Image source · CC BY 2.0

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